


sea-change

by foxlives



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 18:16:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3539237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/foxlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They made it through the winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sea-change

**Author's Note:**

> pieces of the characters' lives, post-season four. mostly written before season five started or while only an episode or two had aired, so their might be a few discrepancies, nothing major.
> 
>  **warnings** for homophobic violence.

**i.**

Rain comes down heavy on the sidewalks, on the fancy cut stone of the campus buildings. Just rich fucks showing off how rich they are, but they've grown on Lip, all pale sandstone and carved-out arches. Like this, in the rain, just a little imperfect, he likes them the best.

He jogs to the L, the streets gone slick and blacker than seems imaginable, the sky dim. His backpack's weighted down with stolen burger patties from the cafeteria, wrapped up thickly in plastic. Dinner tonight, if he can get home in time, if he makes this train.

The platform is damp, dirty cement and yellow caution edges. Lip smokes, rocking onto the balls of his feet, trying to keep warm against the chill. Up here everything feels slightly better, somehow, high above the street and its tiny inconsequential people, buildings and blacktop stretching out below him.

The train comes and he flicks the mostly-smoked cigarette away, steps on. He feels best here, in the dirty car in constant motion, watching Hyde Park disintegrate into the ghetto. In between, doesn't have to pledge himself to anywhere.

He gets home and it's the same, mostly, Fiona doing laundry in the kitchen and the kids off wherever. Ian laying in bed at the Milkovich house still, but Lip won't think about that, a little skip in his mind. Fiona says, "Hey," and he says, "Hey." He shrugs out of his jacket and pulls the burger patties out of his backpack. "Brought dinner," he feels like he needs to say.

Fiona smiles, grateful, over an armful of clothes. They work silently for a few minutes, Lip extracting the frying pan from the clatter of pots and pans under the counter, Fiona tugging damp clothes out of the drum of the machine. 

She keeps glancing at him, though. He's wondering what that means, when she says, "Me an' Vee are thinkin about goin out tonight."

"Yeah?" He looks up from the triple layer of plastic he's tearing through to get to the frozen patties. "You think that's, you know. A good idea?"

She rolls her eyes, but her expression's gone brittle. "We're gettin drinks, Lip, not snortin coke off each other's abs." 

"Slippery slope," he says like it's a joke, but he knows it's not and she knows it's not and it falls flat in the air between them. 

She starts stuffing laundry in the machine with improbable determination, and he knows that in the shaky peace they've strung up between them that he's the one who needs to say something now, to right this. He sighs, spreading his hands on the edge of the counter, leaning on his braced arms.

"Just be careful, okay?" he says finally. It's the kind of thing she would've told him, when they were kids or even a few months ago, back when he was the one who fucked up. He feels unmoored, his whole life capsized while he looked away. If Lip believed in a higher power he'd think he was being punished for something, the guilt festering in his gut when he'd left home made manifest. 

As it is, Lip doesn't believe in anything but his brain and his fists and sheer dumb luck. All the guilt in the world, his or Fiona's or anyone's, can't change a thing.

Fiona goes upstairs and comes down again in a dress and nicer hair, a pair of heels dangling from two fingers. They look at each other over the kitchen counter. Some distance has collapsed between them, the four years difference or Fiona's entrenched place at the head of the family, the winter putting them on equal ground. Lip's still not sure how he feels about that, not being Fiona Gallagher's little brother anymore.

The silence sits, and he knows again that he has to save it, save them. "You look nice," he says. An apology but also a denial, calling back to the old days of doing homework on his bed as Fiona got ready to go out. Like somehow, nothing's changed.

She smiles a little. "Thanks."

 

Fiona comes home that night at three minutes to nine, a little out of breath, and Lip says, "Hey. You made it."

"Yep." She trips out of her heels, looking tenuous, unsteady. She smiles at him like she's proving something. "It was fun."

"Good."

She shoves a hand through her hair, perfectly curled from two hours spent in front of the bathroom mirror. "The kids here?"

"Liam's asleep," Lip tells her, closing over his laptop. "Debs and Carl're visiting Ian." 

She looks tired again in the space of seconds, her face falling back to its natural state. "You didn't go with 'em?"

Lip shrugs. He did want to wait for Fiona, some betraying part of his mind still convinced that she's going to disappear again, Wisconsin or somewhere farther. There's an equally faithless part of him, though, that doesn't want to see Ian, laid out in Mickey Milkovich's room like he's already dead. Doesn't want to watch as he becomes some distorted version of his brother, same as Monica, more proof stacked up that no one can really leave here whole. He's been losing Ian in pieces since Ian was fifteen years old, and he wonders sickly if this is the last one, the final stone pulled out from under them.

Fiona's mouth is drawing thin. She looks incomplete, feet pale and bare on the floor, hair falling out of its perfect waves and back to rough curls. "I don't need a babysitter, Lip," she says, like it's a ridiculous thought.

"Not a babysitter."

"I don't need a parent," she says, and they both freeze. Fiona's looking at him and he's staring down, at the sleek brushed chrome of his laptop that already has a scratch in it, thin and insidious, nothing passing through this house without paying a toll.

He looks up at her. He wants to say _of course you do_ , wants to say _we all do_ , wants to say _why do think we're even in this fucking mess?_ But contrary to what popular belief and his own name might suggest, Lip can hold his tongue if he needs to. If it's dire enough, if it's his sister's wide eyes and guilty look.

So he lets the moment sit, him and Fiona caught in some bizarre staring contest, before he says, "Just worried about you, you know."

"Not your job." But Fiona doesn't sound convinced.

"Should be somebody's job."

She doesn't say anything to that, but he knows she doesn't believe. Even after jail and convictions and the wide black ring around her ankle, she stills thinks that she's in control, that her life is or has even been her own. 

She sighs, slumps down on the couch next to him. Lip pulls the computer onto his lap, goes back to writing this dumb fucking paper he has due. They sit next to each and wait for the kids to come home.

 

**ii.**

The house has gone quiet again, dead and dim, and Mandy doesn't know how to deal. She's lived in this house her whole life and it's never been quiet, never learned how to fall asleep to anything but the roar of the TV and her brothers and dad crashing around, drunk and stupid. She can't stand it: she gets out of that bed, her bed, careful not to let the floorboards creak, careful not to make a sound. 

The bathroom door is cracked open, letting a handswith of light out into the hall. She figures it's Mickey and is going to pad carefully past to the kitchen when the door opens farther and it's like seeing a ghost, Ian standing in the doorway.

He sees her and doesn't say a word, doesn't even react. She whispers, "Hey."

He looks tired like she's never seen him, not even when they used to stay up all night watching movies and eating junk food and he'd still insist on going to school the next day. That feels like a lifetime ago, like they were different people. She likes those people better, she thinks. She'd do a lot to go back there.

"Had to," and he hooks a thumb over his shoulder. He braces his palm against the doorframe, like just standing there is a feat. "Bathroom."

She nods. She wants to do something, shake him or kiss him or tell him, _don't get back in that fuckin bed_. But all she does is step back to let him back to Mickey's room, empty and dim. 

 

It's way too fucking early the next morning when there's a knock on the front door, short and terse. Not her brothers, then. Mandy's already up, hadn't gone back to sleep.

She opens the door and it's Fiona, arms crossed against the cold that's now curling in the door from outside. Mandy crosses her bare legs, says, "What?"

"Ian?" Fiona asks, the question asked so many times by now it's been worn down to just a nub.

Mandy shrugs, says, "What do you think?" but it doesn't come out as mean as she thought it would.

She steps back just enough that Fiona can come inside. Mandy looks down at her own feet, pale and alien-looking on the floor, as Fiona peels off her gloves and hat. She always feels stupid and ashamed when Fiona comes over, not like Ian or Lip or the younger ones. Mandy suddenly sees all the shit laying around, the nicotine-stained walls, furniture broken or held together with packing tape. She feels too warm, put under a spotlight, watching herself like how she thinks Fiona watches her. Some slut who used to fuck her brother. 

Mickey's knocked out on the couch, arm slung over his face and a mostly-empty fifth of whiskey on the floor next to him. Mandy knows what it looks like, can guess at what's going through Fiona's mind. She keeps her head ducked as she leads Fiona to the bedroom, like somehow if she can't see any of this Fiona can't, either.

Mandy watches from the doorway as Fiona walks around the bed to crouch in the narrow space between bed and wall, just trying to look Ian in the eye. "Hey, bud," she says in a soft, kind voice that Mandy can't bear. It always feels like trespassing to be around when the Gallaghers come to visit Ian, knowing he belonged to them before he ever belonged to her. She remembers having to try hard to reconcile the tough, caring Fiona who Ian would talk about with the Fiona she'd known when she lived in the Gallagher house, but seeing her with Ian these past weeks, she's maybe started to get it. She doesn't want to. Witnessing that kind of family devotion has never made her feel anything but cold.

She goes out to the kitchen and turns on the stove, lighting a cigarette in the gas flame and starting eggs. There's a muffled groan from the couch and she hears Mickey turn over, turn over again, and finally sit up. She can see the back of his head over the couch, bent forward like he's rubbing at his eyes.

When he finally stands up, leaning on the arm of the couch, she tells him, "Fiona's here."

"The fuck?" he asks, voice scratchy, not quite there.

"I said Fiona's fuckin here, assface." 

He's still leaning on the couch. None of them ever seem to be able to stand up straight. "Great," he mutters, "got it, fuckin a." He heaves himself toward the bathroom without looking back at her.

Fiona comes out to the kitchen while Mickey's still in the bathroom, and Mandy thinks that's probably for the best. "Out already?" Mandy asks, snide.

Fiona just shrugs, brushing hair off her face. "He seem any different lately?"

Mandy just shrugs, shoving eggs around in the frying pan. "He was up last night," she finally says, against her better judgement and the stupid feeling she has that last night was just for Ian and her, a secret between them like old times. "Just to take a piss, but." She shrugs again. "He was like, upright."

"Yeah?" Fiona asks. She sounds hopeful but they both know that's bullshit. Or Mandy knows it's bullshit. She doesn't know what the fuck Fiona knows.

The bathroom door slams open and Mickey stomps out and then into his bedroom without even glancing at them. This whole house is laid out for people to know each other's shit, and that's never been a blessing. 

"How's Mickey?" Fiona asks, eyes on the bedroom door. Mandy doesn't know how to take that, hasn't learned to read Fiona very well yet. It makes her shoulders feel tight, her stomach pinched, not knowing the right answer.

"Uh, you know," she says finally. Fiona looks back to her, eyes like she actually cares, which is maybe what makes Mandy admit, "Shitty."

Fiona just nods.

They stand across from each other; Mandy shifts her feet on the cold slick linoleum, and Fiona's looking around the kitchen like it'll tell her more than Mandy ever will.

Svetlana walks in, carrying the baby, and tells Mandy, "Eggs are burning." 

Svetlana looks at Fiona and they size each other up for a moment. "How is little one?" Svetlana asks finally, guarded. "Liam?" The name sounds strange when she says it.

"Um," Fiona says, "good. He's uh, he's really good."

Svetlana nods. "Good."

Mandy's obviously lost control of some critical part of her life, so she turns back to the stovetop, flipping off the gas and scraping mounds of eggs onto plates. Without turning around, she mutters, "You want some?"

Fiona takes a moment, but she must understand it's directed at her because she says, "Thanks, but. I gotta get back.

"Lip should be comin around some time this afternoon," Fiona keeps going, like she doesn't know the way just hearing his name gives her a cold thrill. "And Debbie and Carl, later."

Mandy just shrugs. Her house has become a revolving door of Gallaghers and all she wants is for it to stop, for Ian to get out of bed and everything to fall back into its rightful place.

"Okay," Fiona says. She lets herself out.

 

**iii.**

The chalkboard is gray and the cinderblock walls are gray and the square of sky Carl can see out of the smeared glass window is the same dull gray. He feels shitty, hungover and restless. He wants to move; he wants to get out of here.

The minute the bell rings he's up and out of his chair, first out of the door by virtue of a few thrown elbows and a quickness he'd learned early, just by being a small kid growing up on the South Side. He's out the double doors and onto the street before the bell's finished ringing.

He doesn't want to go home, hasn't wanted to go home for a few months now. It's raining outside, thin but steady. He hunches his shoulders up inside the new jacket he'd found in the back of the closet, leather and red with the Blackhawks logo on the back. He only remembers seeing Ian wear it like once or twice, which he thinks is dumb: it's a good fucking coat, thick and warm and practically new. And he likes wearing it, now that Ian's been laying in bed for weeks now. It makes him feel bigger, better, but he tells himself that if Ian gets up, he'll give the coat back. A deal. He's not really sure with who.

He kicks around, slowly making his way back to Wallace Street. He misses the bus on purpose and has to walk the whole way, which is shitty cause of the rain but he doesn't think he could stand being stuck in that stupid bus with all those stupid kids, anyway. 

It takes him an hour, wandering around and taking wrong turns on purpose. When he finally gets home there's Lip standing at the kitchen counter and no one else, all the lights turned off and the house weirdly quiet.

"Hey, bud," Lip says, looking up. "You jump in a pool or somethin?"

"It was raining," Carl says. He scuffs the side of his shoe against the kitchen floor, rubber squeaking wetly on the linoleum. "Why are you here?" he says, and it comes out meaner than he meant it.

Lip seem to get that, though. He says, "Fiona called me. Ian's better."

"What?"

"Ian. He's like, up and talking and stuff. Fi and Debs took Liam over there a little while ago." Lip looks at him. "You okay?"

Carl's fine. He keeps thinking _ian's up, ian's up_ , like a scratched CD.

"Can we go see him?"

"Yup." Lip stacks two foil pans on top of each other, all glinting and space-age in the dim kitchen light. "Goin over there now with dinner." He jerks his head toward the pans.

"Cool." Carl drops his backpack onto the kitchen tile, kicking it to the corner. Lip scoops up the pans and hooks a thumb in his keyring, a little silver Swiss Army knife Carl's always had his eye on. There's a new key on it, big with a chunky black top part, and Carl wonders whose car it's for. He sort of hopes Lip stole it; that'd be pretty cool.

They walk to the Milkovich house without saying anything, the streets dark, only every fourth or fifth streetlight still glowing sickly orange. Carl wonders if Ian's gonna be like he used to be, or if he'd still be the strange jittery Ian he was after he came back. He figures it doesn't really matter, as long as he stops just lying there.

It's Fiona who answers the door. Lip holds up the pans, says, "We come bearing shitty lasagna."

"Thank fuck," Fiona says, and she's smiling, and Carl can't remember the last time she was smiling. She takes one of the pans from Lip and ruffles a hand over Carl's hair, and Carl doesn't even bother ducking away like he would if it was Lip, or really anyone else. Fiona going to jail had fucked everything up, and he's just glad she's back, that the world has started putting itself back together again.

People are sitting all over the couch and at the table and just standing around, the rest of his family and Mickey and Mandy and Mickey's wife and her totally hot girlfriend and the baby. There are already bags of chips and beer bottles all over, and Carl's pretty sure even two industrial-sized pans of lasagna aren't going to be enough. He goes to pile his jackets on the heap by the door, and Lip mutters to him, "Might wanna hang onta that. No tellin if it's gonna be here when you get back."

Carl just shrugs.

 

Ian looks better, more like the brother Carl remembers before he stopped getting out of bed and ran away and stopped getting of bed again. He's wearing clean clothes and his hair looks less stringy, and he's smiling at something, grabbing a handful of forks from a drawer and laying them out on the counter. Carl goes over to him and latches his arms around him before he can talk himself out of it.

"Hey, man," Ian says. His voice is normal again too, lower and slowed-down.

"I'm glad you're not like Monica," Carl tells him, but his face is smashed against Ian's shirt and he's not really sure if Ian even hears him. 

Until Ian says, "Me, too," and hugs him hard before letting go. He claps a hand on Carl's shoulder and smiles, and he looks like the old Ian, who was always calm and nice and didn't do shit like run away or sleep for weeks straight. 

Carl grins back. 

 

They all sit around the Milkovichs' kitchen table, stained and scarred. The section in front of Carl is pale, like someone had spilled acid on the wood. They eat lasagna off paper plates, and Fiona and Lip and sometimes Debbie chat like this is normal or something. 

Ian looks tired again and Carl worries, watches his face as he stares at his plate and wonders if he isn't as better as he pretended he was. He'd seemed like the real Ian again just fifteen minutes ago: now he's all blank and pale again. Maybe he'd been faking before, or maybe what Carl thought was the real Ian wasn't the real Ian at all. It's a fucked-up thought, the world he thought he knew gone crooked a little. Maybe really no one in his family are who he thought they were, the foundation of his whole world and it turns out to be built unsteady. 

If this is what growing up feels like, Carl thinks it fucking sucks.

 

**iv.**

Water runs tracks down the shower wall and Ian watches them like they have answers, like they mean anything at all. He feels better now, out of bed for a week or two. He's promised Mickey he'll stop doing whatever he was doing, whatever weird cocktail of drugs dragged him down like that. He's promised his family he'll never do that again, never scare them like that. Now that he's on the other side of it he knows what it looked like, who he looked like, and he promises them. He won't do it again.

It seems like an easy promise to keep, now. His life's righted itself, sails caught wind. He eats, he goes for runs. He showers. He's got his job back despite Mickey's pulled-tight mouth, Ian promising him he's overreacting, promising himself of the lines he won't cross this time. He has Mickey's bed to sleep in now, knows exactly what he's returning to and where his next meal's coming from. He's good now. He takes care of the baby, he makes breakfast, he fucks Mickey. All normal things. He's good.

He watches the wall, watches the water slip over the ordered rows of tile. That's what his mind feels like sometimes, made up of white smooth pieces but with something insidious between them, black rot eating its way in between. It's a trick, keeping the rot from crawling over everything else, and he's gotten good at it. A skill, like anything else. Ian stares at his hands braced on the wall, large and pale. 

The door bangs open, Mickey's voice saying, "Hey, asshole, way to use all the hot water." He's only a vague form through the shower curtain, edges smudged, and that scares Ian badly for some reason; he drags back the curtain, plasticky material crumpling in his hand. 

Mickey looks immediately better, solid and real and pissed-off, still mostly half-asleep and with his boxers twisted around his hips. "Easy solution, you know," Ian says, starting to smile. He sees Mickey and it's like everything gets better, the world around him slowing down and evening out. 

Mickey just stares at him, so Ian says, rolling his eyes, "Get in with me, asshole."

Mickey gets this look on his face, then. Disbelieving and almost distrusting, like Ian's going to say, just kidding, and laugh in his face. Ian doesn't know how to get rid of it except to keeping asking, keep promising things. That he's going to keep liking Mickey no matter how much of his insides he shows.

"C'mon," he says, softer. He reaches out, a dripping hand on the back of Mickey's neck. He pulls Mickey forward and he comes without resisting, still a novelty. Ian leans out of the stream of water, presses their foreheads together over the slick porcelain edge of the tub. "C'mon, Mick," he whispers, mouths so close.

Mickey kisses him, and Ian tugs him forward, one arm sliding around his back. Mickey steps over the edge of the tub, not even bothering to take off his boxers. Ian shoves him up against the back wall, probably too rough but Mickey just groans low into his mouth. 

It's like there's this heat building under Ian's skin all the time, pulsing through his arms, out of his hands. Raw and uncontrolled. Superstrength, except he doesn't know how to use it yet. Mickey doesn't seem to mind, doesn't even give Ian that look, that _the fuck's wrong with you?_ look he keeps getting from everyone, his family. Mickey just rolls his hips up, bites into Ian's mouth. Like it's normal, like Ian's normal. Like they're normal, like Mickey hadn't spent the better part of the last two, two and a half years pushing Ian away.

He's not pushing Ian away now, though, arms wrapped around his shoulders, one hand in his wet hair. His boxers are soaked by now, dragging low, and Ian thinks he looks better than anything Ian's ever seen. If he could just stay here with Mickey, water warm on his skin and Mickey warm under his hands, he thinks he could be just fine.

 

His skin itches, like it's just a size too small for the rest of him, or like he can't be contained by skin at all. It's not a big deal, just annoying, a tick in the back of his mind as he walks the crooked few blocks back to his house. What used to be his his house.

He pushes open the familiar front door, wood and brass under his fingers that he's touched a thousand times before. Debbie's sitting on the couch, crosslegged and flicking through one of the kinds of magazines he used to sell at the Kash and Grab, shiny and patchwork. "Hey," he says, and she looks up.

"Ian," she says, and he sort of hates that she sounds surprised. "What's up?" she asks casually, like she's confident he must have a reason for being here, concrete and explainable.

"Nothin much." Ian shrugs. "Wanted to come by, see what's goin on." It was true, it was, just because he had to move, get out of the house didn't mean he had to come here. "Hey, I'm starving — you want lunch?"

He thought he was saying something innocuous but Debbie's eyebrows draw together, watching him over the back of the couch. He feels angry but can't hold on to it, the feeling coming brief and mostly irrational and then gone.

"Sure," Debbie says. She smiles at him.

He doesn't move toward the kitchen, though, not hungry now and can't really remember ever being hungry. He sits down next to Debbie on the couch, runs a hand through his hair. It's still damp, a little clinging.

Debbie keeps watching him and she looks older than he remembers, looks older every time he sees her. It makes him sad, a little. He left and she was just a kid and now he's come back and she's not, some almost imperceptible shift. Everyone was gone for a few months, and the people they came back as just aren't the same.

And now his little sister, older than he ever expected her to be. He wonders if this is something everyone goes through, that moment when you realize kids you always thought would be kids, aren't anymore. 

"You okay?" she asks, after a few minutes. Ian isn't as bothered by her asking as he's been by Fiona and Lip and Mickey, constantly eying him, questions ballasted with too many other things they aren't asking. Debbie asks it simple, like she really wants to know. Like she's not scared of what he could say.

"Yeah, Debs," he says, earnest, really meaning it. "I'm fine."

She nods, eyebrows drawn together in a look that had always seemed too old for her, before. "Okay."

He reaches over, kisses the side of her head, and she smiles at him. 

 

**v.**

Debbie comes home from school and the house is the same, quieter than it's probably ever been. Even spending too long at Holly's after school every day, she can't avoid the unnatural stillness the house has to it now. She throws her backpack on the couch, irritated and she doesn't know why.

She stands at the kitchen counter, trying to decide if she wants something to eat, wondering if Fiona or Lip is bringing home dinner tonight or if she should start sifting through the cabinets for something. 

The back door slams open, closed, and Carl shoves past her and up the stairs. He smells familiar, general-familiar and not Carl-familiar. Like Lip sometimes, Frank always, smoke and alcohol and sweat. She knows with a stupid helpless feeling that he was hanging around Frank again, like he has ever since he left the hospital. She sighs sharply.

Debbie stares at the kitchen counter a moment, makes a decision that isn't really a decision and turns to climb up the stairs.

Carl's fiddling with his phone, slumped on Ian's old bed. He'd started sleeping there after Ian got low, and she'd noticed but hadn't said anything about it. She remembers the nights when Fiona had been in jail, when Debbie would get up in the middle of the night, sleepless, to pad quietly across floorboards to her sister's room. Crawling under the blankets that smelled like the same detergent as all the others, but she could still close her eyes under them and feel better, unexplainably.

She sits next to him, not saying a word. "What do you want?" Carl snaps, talking to worn-thin rug.

"You shouldn't hang out with Frank," she says in her best I-know-better-than-you voice, perfected from a lifetime of mimicking her older siblings. "He's a shitty dad. And a shitty person. And he's just gonna pull you down with him."

Carl just shrugs, and she wants to shove at him, make him understand. She just wants him to get it, swift and fast and painless — not like she'd had to, piece by piece. She doesn't want him to end up like Lip and Ian and even Fiona would joke he would, but she doesn't think their relationship allows for things like pep talks or interventions or whatever this is. If Lip told Ian not to do something, she's sure Ian wouldn't do it. If Fiona told any of them anything, she knows they'd listen. Or they would've, before. But everything's fucked up now, and she just doesn't want Carl to get fucked up along with it, any more than any of them.

"Fine," Debbie snaps, suddenly, painfully tired of trying to keep this family together. "But he's gonna let you down and it's gonna be your own stupid fault, cause I warned you."

She gets up, stomps over to the door and wrenches it open before she hears Carl say, "Whatever," sullen and unwilling.

She turns around. Carl saying _whatever_ usually meant he was listening to you enough to reply, and that was more than usual, meant you made some kind of impression. Debbie closes the door again, leans back against it and crosses her arms.

"You miss Bonnie?" she asks finally, wondering if this'll work. When they were little they could talk to each other sometimes, between nougies and bickering and stealing each other's stuff. Mostly about their siblings, how Ian hadn't been around or how Lip'd seemed angry or Fiona sad. It would mostly be Debbie talking, but Carl would listen intently, sitting next to her on her bedroom floor or on his bed. It was probably the longest he sat still, ever.

Now, Carl scoffs, says, "No," like even the idea of the question is stupid. Then he shrugs. "A little. She was cool."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"Fuck off," Carl tells her, shaking his head, and pulls his feet up on to the bed, laying down with his back to the door.

"Okay," she says. She doesn't feel any better, but she doesn't feel any worse. She goes back to her room.

 

When she goes down to breakfast the next morning Lip's sitting at the counter, elbows resting on a drift of textbooks and notes. His head is in his hands and for a moment Debbie wonders if he's sleeping, if he slept here all night.

She prods at his shoulder. "Lip?"

"Mmph?" Lip looks up, eyes open if exhausted-looking.

"Thought you were sleeping."

He laughs shortly. "I wish." He reaches out, ruffles her hair, like for a second he forgot she's not eight years old anymore.

"Hey!" She shoves him away. "It took me like, twenty minutes to get it to lay flat." She smoothes it back down, turns away to grab one of the industrial-sized bags of cereal laying slumped on top of the fridge. "It's Friday," she points out, opening the fridge.

"Outta milk," Lip tells her, and she shuts the fridge with a huff of annoyance. "Teacher cancelled class," he answers her. "And I covered an extra work study shift Tuesday. Can't legally work more than the mandated amount of hours, so." He shrugs.

"You could've stayed at school," she tells him, grabbing a bowl from the sink and rinsing it out. "Lots easier to study there."

"Isn't, actually." He writes something on one of the sheets of paper sprawled in front of him, and looking over, Debbie realizes it's a grocery list. It looks like Fiona's, lots of stuff scratched out and little price notations next to each item. Debbie wonders about that, can't picture Lip in the grocery store carefully checking coupons and putting stuff in the cart, taking it out, putting it in again. It's such a Fiona job, inseparable from her.

"I could go to the store later," she offers, nodding at the list. There's a coupon flier tucked underneath it, its brightly-inked edges showing.

"Nah, Debs." He makes hands for the cereal, and she gives the bag to him. "I'll take care of it."

Debbie pokes a spoon at her dry bowl of cereal, stirring it around a little. "Fiona's back," she says finally, still looking at the cereal, "from jail, and. . .everything. You don't have to keep being her."

"Not tryin to," Lip tells her, too easy, and Debbie knows it's a lie. "Just wanna make sure you guys get fed, huh?" he says lightly. 

Debbie takes a bite of cereal, powdery between her teeth. Lip doesn't say anything else for a minute, and Debbie looks up to find him watching her, looking more solemn. Considering. "You're doin good, Debs," he says finally. "These last few months, with everything. You've been great."

It's the nicest thing he could've said and he probably knows it, always good at reading people if he wants to. There's a part of Debbie that hasn't ever stopped being the little girl who just wants a family, just wants everyone taken care of and whole. She's started trying to push it down, that stupid childish conviction that any of this could be fixed or solved, but Lip says that and it breaks free again. 

"Thanks," she mutters.

There's a rustle of flimsy newsprint pages being shuffled through, a crackling sound as Lip roots around in the bag of cereal, popping a handful into his mouth. Morning sunlight glares pale over the kitchen, and for a few minutes things are peaceful, easy. "Hey, you know if Carl still has that thing for that pasta sauce?" Lip asks finally, pouring over the coupon insert.

She knows what he's doing, backing up what he just said. Like he thinks she needs some kind of pep talk. She thinks briefly about asking him to talk to Carl, tell him to stay away from Frank and do better in school, but she's not sure his Fiona act stretches that far.

But she tells him the brand and watches him tear out the coupon, tiny careful tears. She knows what he's doing but she maybe doesn't mind, likes feeling that this family could still be fixed with the right kind of pasta sauce, the right words said at the right time. 

She sighs, puts her bowl in the sink. She grabs her backpack from the pile next to the back door, calls a quick, "See ya!" and waits for Lip's "Bye, Debs," before she slams the door behind her.

 

**vi.**

It's ten minutes til last call and Mickey's sitting at the bar with his fingers wrapped around his beer glass like his father's hands wrapped around his neck, like Ian's hands wrapped around his wrists early that morning. All shit he shouldn't be thinking about, sitting at the Alibi in the middle of the night. Kev's eyeing him but Mickey doesn't have anything he's supposed to be doing, the last customer stumbling down the stairs a few minutes before.

The bar's door swishes open and shut and Mickey doesn't look up until there's a hand on his back, at the same time Ian says, "Hey, Mick," so Mickey only panics a little.

He says, "The fuck you doin here?"

Ian shrugs, leaning both elbows back against the bar, close enough to brush against Mickey's wrist. "Couldn't sleep," he says. "Thought I'd walk you home."

Ian's hair is damp, and the shirt he's wearing is one he usually sleeps in. Mickey thinks about Ian taking a shower, getting into bed. Getting back up again to walk here. Mickey can put together whole stories from just looking at Ian and it scares him, really, knowing someone else that well.

He says, "Don't need a fuckin keeper, man."

"Uh-huh." Ian swipes the pack of cigarettes Mickey has laying next to him on the bar, draws one out with his teeth. He's started smoking again since he got up, and it had been a relief, another thing put right.

Ian leans back on his elbows and tips his head, blows smoke toward the ever-present cloud clinging to the ceiling and dark corners. His jaw is cut clean, not a trace of stubble, which means he'd been at work earlier. The night showering makes more sense now. Mickey downs the last of his beer in a fast swallow, holds it up to Kev with a raise of his eyebrows.

"Seriously, man?" Kev asks, still stacking glasses under the bar. "It's like, two minutes til I kick you out."

"Aw, c'mon," Ian says, twisting around to lean forward over the bar. He's turned toward Mickey and their shoulders are pressed together now, warm and solid. Mickey makes himself stare down at the bar, at a crucifix scratched in the wood and not over his shoulder, at anyone who could be watching right now. "Two beers," Ian's saying now, "for the road?"

Kev looks to the heavens but they all know he'll cave. Ian being up and around and teasing is still too new to all of them: they'll still do whatever he wants, practically. Mickey should fucking know.

Kev cracks the tops off two bottles and clunks them down on the bartop, saying, "Fine, but they're on your tab," pointing threateningly at Mickey. Mickey flips him off at the same time Ian gives a mock, two-fingered salute.

"You're both adorable," Kev tells them. "Now get outta my bar."

 

They cut their way home through alleyways, dodging brown puddles of rainwater and greased cardboard takeout containers and slices of broken glass in every color. Ian's got his hands shoved deep in his jeans pockets and his shoulders hitched up against the cold and Mickey's saying, "'s your own fuckin fault, man, what do think this is, fuckin Tijuana —" when someone calls, "Hey, faggots!"

Mickey wheels around, throat caving in on itself. Like hands around his neck, pressing. He hates that feeling more than he hates almost anything, and he's about to open his mouth, throw a punch, when he feels Ian moving next to him.

Ian's saying, "You wanna fuckin say that again?" and Mickey's briefly caught off guard, glancing around at him. Ian's smiling, wide and flat with too many teeth, fucking ugly smile; it scares Mickey, calls up something bitter in his chest, and he barely hears when the guy says, "I said, _hey, faggots_."

Mickey's not sure who moves first, him or Ian or one of the guys, but it doesn't matter. Mickey's vision telescopes down to whatever's in front of him, everything else blurred and softened, unimportant. For a few minutes the world is simple, reduced undebatably to the principles Mickey knows to be true: cause the most pain. Protect your own.

He socks the first guy in the gut, knocks him on his ass long enough to get on top of him, pinning him down. He's still got the beer in his hand and Mickey doesn't even have to think about it; he grins at the guy, taking a last sip before smashing the glass against his face, grinding the jagged edges into his skin. The guy screams, blood and beer running down his neck, into his hair, off the sides of his face and onto the gummed concrete.

"Who's the faggot now, huh?" Mickey growls in his face. He tosses away the neck of the bottle, still unbroken in his hand, and stands up, makes sure to clip the guy in the jaw as he steps off him.

Ian's fighting off the other two guys, but one of them's got him in a chokehold and the other one's going in for a gut punch, when Mickey shouts "Ay!" and they look up long enough for Ian to bite down on the first guy's arm, twisting out of his grip.

He gets shoulder-to-shoulder with Mickey, who says, not taking his eyes off the assholes still standing, "You fight like a fuckin girl, man."

"Learned that one from Debbie," Ian says, and without looking Mickey knows he's grinning. "Comes in useful."

Mickey opens his mouth to reply — something about _pretty much proving my point, man_ — but these guys are apparently the fight-not-flight types, and that's something Mickey respects only in theory.

It's pretty ugly, even with their friend still groaning on the cement and an even matchup. These assholes are obviously pretty drunk and maybe so is Mickey, what the fuck ever. It feels good, knuckles splitting open on one guy's jaw, the spare-change taste of blood in his mouth. He feels good. His lips are curled back, half a snarl, half a grin.

He gets lucky, gets a handful of the guy's hair and enough purchase to slam his head into the brick. The guy groans and falls to his hands and knees, and Mickey looks around in time to see Ian head-butt the final guy, sending him staggering back onto his ass.

Ian gets in a final, vicious kick to the guy's side, a look on his face Mickey barely recognizes. He doesn't think about that; doesn't think about anything except his next move. 

He kneels down next to the guy Ian just kicked in the gut, the leader, the one who started this shit in the first place. Grabs the collar of his shirt and hauls him closer. Mickey bares his teeth again, feral, looks the guy straight in the eye. 

"Do not," he says, "fuck with us," sharp on his tongue, spitting out broken glass. He shakes him, jerking him forward. "You fuckin hear me?"

The guy nods frantically, eyes on Mickey. "Good," Mickey says, and spits, a curl of pleasure in his chest when the guy winces away. He tosses the guy away from him, his head thunking back on the concrete. 

Ian's waiting for him, and they walk out of the alley together, back to a main street stained orange with the occasional working streetlight. The high is falling away fast: Mickey can feel the hands closing in on his throat again, thick-fingered hands the way his dad's had been. Slamming Mickey against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster, saying _c'mon, son. what are you, a fuckin faggot? hit back. hit back._

Ian says, "You okay?" worried. Mickey doesn't realize until halfway home that his hands are shaking.

 

**vii.**

Fiona wakes up sudden in the middle of the night, to a rushing sound she doesn't realize for whole drawn-out seconds is rain. It's pouring down outside like judgment, sluicing over the window glass, battering tinnily on the gutters. She's always felt small in the rain, the world cut off from around her. She's never decided if she likes it or not.

She pushes herself out of bed, knowing she's too awake already to go back to sleep. She hardly ever falls back asleep once she wakes up, doesn't matter how early it is: she wakes up and her mind starts running, dragging her conscious whether she likes it or not.

Creeping downstairs, she sets herself up on the couch, thinking she should do something useful with the extra hours she has but she can't think of what. She feels too far behind, whatever small thing she'd be able to do before dawn not enough anymore. She was always stumbling to catch up but now she's standing still, watching the distance grow in front of her without doing a thing about it, dread in her stomach but without the willpower anymore to start moving again, one foot in front of the other.

She remembers Lip telling her, just a couple of years ago but it seems insurmountably longer, to go with Jimmy when for a minute she'd let herself believe that he could be a solution, the solution. Lip standing in the shadowy living room, saying _we'll be all right_. She thinks now, irrationally, that maybe somehow he'd known, could predict with that freakishly large brain of his that someday something like this would happen. That she'd let them down. She wonders if they would've been better off, if she'd left them all those years ago.

There's a thump in the kitchen, the sucking sound of the fridge door opening, closing. The hit and clatter of someone opening a beer on the counter's edge over the rushing sound of the rain outside. It's a few moments before she realizes Lip's standing in the doorway of the living room, drinking the beer and watching her with that look he has now.

"Hey," he says quietly, once he's seen she's noticed him. "Burnin midnight oil, huh?"

She shrugs, pulling her knees closer to her chest. "Couldn't sleep."

He nods, pads over to sit next to her on the couch. He leans their shoulders together. "Know the feeling," he says, lifting the beer bottle, before setting it on the floor in front of them. He sits legs sprawled in front of him, slumping onto the couch with a huff of breath.

"Whatcha thinkin about?" he asks after a few moments, dragging his head to the side to watch her.

"Nothin," she says, assuring. He waits her out, though, watching her steady and sure. She thinks he's changed, these last few months, or — shifted. Different parts of him drawn up to the surface. She wonders if that's what happened to her, at seventeen or fourteen or even earlier, that shift. Guilt sits thick in her stomach, that she was the one to cause it in her brother, than any of them had to go through it at all. They all grew up too fucking fast, and for just a moment she lets herself feel angry for them.

"I love you guys," she says finally, blunt and catching her off guard. "You know that, right?"

"Jesus, Fi," Lip says, breathing out a laugh. "You okay?"

"What I did — it's not because I didn't — or because I was tired of takin care of you, or any'a that," she says fast. She didn't even know she need this off her chest until she'd said it, words coming out a little frantic, needing him, needing them all to understand.

"I know," Lip says softly, comfortingly.

"Do the kids?" she whispers. "Did I really fuck them up?"

"Nah," Lip tells her, pretending casual. "They were already fucked up. Nothin you can do about that."

"I went to _jail_. Fuck."

"Not the end of the world, you know," Lip tells her. "You're out now. And hey." He hooks two fingers in the wide plastic loop of the ankle monitor, stark and ugly even in the dim light. He tugs at it gently. "Least you got some cool jewelry outta the deal." 

She chokes a laugh, sound catching in her throat. "Yeah. Lucky me." She feels unsteady, put out to sea. She'd spent her whole life trying to be a person it turns out she's not, and she doesn't know what to do now. Where to go from here.

"I never wanted to be this person," she tells him, voice small to her own ears. She takes a breath, and it shakes in her chest.

Lip keeps his hand there, knuckles warm on her always-cold skin. "I know," he says, like he does. "I know."

The living room is early-morning dark, soft and indistinct. They sit, shoulders shored up against each other, and wait for the rain to stop.


End file.
